(I'll repeat what I just posted to my
blog about Python on Symbian)
Nokia has released the Alpha 1.1.0 release of the forthcoming Python Interpreter for Series 60 platform (registration required) dubbed Amaretto.
From a quick glance over the accompanying documents, it looks like the Python Interpreter will indeed be a quite useful piece of work with its support for multi-threading, a UI toolkit (surprise, surprise -- you didn't think you had learned all Symbian UI APIs by now, did you?), and of course the ability to interface with the underlying Symbian OS C/C++ API. The user's guide lists Bluetooth, database access, HTTP client support, and socket support for inter-process communication (processes communicate over sockets in the Symbian architecture) as ongoing work and a few items for a longer-term roadmap.
It looks like the Python Interpreter installs itself into the device as an application you can launch as any other app. Then, it asks whether you want to execute a script somewhere in the filesystem or start an interactive session (I can imagine people going "finally, a decent calculator for my Nokia" at this point...). As a small detail, the interactive session interprets three pushes of the '0'-key as an <enter>. How weird is that.
You install your Python applications to the device by compiling them into a .pyi file using a Nokia-provided tool, makepyi, and sending it to the terminal where the Python Interpreter's Application Manager recognizes the MIME type and takes control.
The Python Interpreter speaks version 2.2.2 of the language and supports the following modules: binascii, code, codeop, errno, exceptions, __future__, ipm, linecache, marshal, operator, os (partly), os.path (partly), struct, sys,
thread, time, traceback, and types. More will be added, of course.
Sounds like a good start to me.
Do you think Python will bypass
Java and C++ as the programming language of choice for Symbian developers? I certainly think it has a chance.
